Brian Druker

Brian Jay Druker (born April 30, 1955 in St. Louis ) is an American medical doctor and cancer researcher. He was best known for his work on the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia with the active ingredient imatinib .

Scientific career

Brian Druker studied medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine , where he received his MD in 1981 . He continued his medical education for internists ( internship , residency ) at Barnes Hospital of Washington University in St. Louis continued and received his training as oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard University . Since 1993 he has been working at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland / Oregon . In his research, Druker focused on the specific inhibition of cancer cells. It has long been known that patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) have a genetic change in their leukemia cells. It is a chromosome translocation that leads to the fusion of two genes at the molecular level, ABL on chromosome 9 and BCR on chromosome 22. This creates a fusion gene and protein that acts as an oncogene . The actual cause of leukemia is the dysregulated ABL gene, which acts as a tyrosine kinase . Druker's idea was to specifically inhibit ABL tyrosine kinase activity in order to treat the associated disease. Many have doubted that such a specific drug could be developed. In addition, it was feared that other tyrosine kinases would also be inhibited, which could then lead to serious side effects (around 100 different tyrosine kinases are known in the human genome today). Many pharmaceutical companies were also not interested in developing a drug for such a rare disease. However, Druker succeeded in winning Novartis as a development partner. At Novartis (or its predecessor, Ciba-Geigy ), the development of specific tyrosine kinase inhibitors had been going on for several years. In collaboration with Novartis, Druker tested several of the substances developed there in clinical phase I studies . One of them proved to be particularly effective in a study started in 1998 and led to a dramatic improvement in blood counts in practically all CML patients within a few weeks. This substance with the laboratory designation STI571 (STI = signal transmission inhibitor , later generic name imatinib ) received due to their effectiveness in a highly accelerated procedure of only 12 weeks in 2001, the FDA -approved under the name Gleevec for the treatment of CML. Approvals in Europe ( Glivec ) and other countries followed. Since then, several large clinical studies have confirmed the efficacy of imatinib with mostly good tolerability and its clear superiority over all other previous treatments for CML. The collaboration also paid off for Novartis. Despite the rarity of the disease CML, Glivec has been one of Novartis' top-selling drugs since 2001.

The importance of this work also lay in the fact that a proof of principle was carried out here, so to speak . It has been shown that in principle it is possible to effectively treat diseases by selective inhibition of tyrosine kinases. This is particularly important in cancer medicine, where, according to the current state of knowledge, dysregulated tyrosine kinases play a key role in many diseases.

Awards

John J. Kenney Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Association for Cancer Research
American Society of Hematology Dameshek Prize

Pioneer of Survivorship Carpe Diem Award from the Lance Armstrong Foundation

Plaque of Honor ( Medal of Honor ) of the American Cancer Society

David A. Karnofsky Prize from the American Society of Clinical Oncology

Warren Alpert Prize of the Harvard Medical School in 2000
Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for Cancer Research 2001
Kettering Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation in 2002
Braunschweig Prize 2003
Robert Koch Prize 2005
Keio Medical Science Prize 2007
Member of the National Academy of Sciences 2007
Meyenburg Prize 2009
Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award 2009
Pasarow Award 2010
Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award 2011
Japan Prize 2012
Dickson Prize in Medicine 2012
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012
Albany Medical Center Prize 2013
Tang Prize for Biopharmaceutical Research 2018
Prince Mahidol Prize 2018
Sjöberg Prize 2019

Web links

Commons : Brian Druker - collection of images, videos and audio files

Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award Description
HHMI Investigators: Brian J Druker , Howard Hughes Medical Institute
iBio seminars: Three slide presentations by Brian Druker (English) , accessed on February 20, 2014

Individual evidence

↑ JH Kabarowski, ON Witte: Consequences of BCR-ABL expression within the hematopoietic stem cell in chronic myeloid leukemia . In: Stem Cells . 18, 2000, pp. 399-408. PMID 11072027
↑ MW Deininger, BJ Druker: Specific targeted therapy of chronic myelogenous leukemia with imatinib . In: Pharmacol Rev . 55, 2003, pp. 401-423. PMID 12869662
↑ C. Müller-Tidow , U. Krug, U. Brunnberg, WE Berdel, H. Serve: Tyrosine kinases as goals of new oncological therapies: prospects and problems. In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . Volume 104, 2007, pp. A1312-A1319.

personal data
SURNAME	Druker, Brian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Druker, Brian Jay (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American medical doctor and cancer researcher
DATE OF BIRTH	April 30, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH	St. Louis

[1] JH Kabarowski, ON Witte: Consequences of BCR-ABL expression within the hematopoietic stem cell in chronic myeloid leukemia . In: Stem Cells . 18, 2000, pp. 399-408. PMID 11072027

[2] MW Deininger, BJ Druker: Specific targeted therapy of chronic myelogenous leukemia with imatinib . In: Pharmacol Rev . 55, 2003, pp. 401-423. PMID 12869662

[3] C. Müller-Tidow , U. Krug, U. Brunnberg, WE Berdel, H. Serve: Tyrosine kinases as goals of new oncological therapies: prospects and problems. In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . Volume 104, 2007, pp. A1312-A1319.